Keep This Quiet! Books

Keep This Quiet! (2011),  Keep THIS Quiet Too! (2012) and Keep This Quiet! III: Initiations (2013) are a memoir series that begins in the late 1960s in New York City, where I had a close relationship with three men. They are Hunter S. Thompson (I copyedited his first book, Hell’s Angels), Jan Mensaert (a Belgian poet living in Morocco), and Milton Klonsky (a fabulously intelligent, hip NYC poet/intellectual/wiseman). This – quite literally – sets the stage of the rest of my life.  This trio of outlaw writers provides the excitement-fraught example of confidence and authenticity I was looking for. I jumped into the fray.

Who’s on the Keep This Quiet! III cover?

From left to right: Milton Klonsky, Carl Jung, Wolfgang Pauli, and Margaret.

The latest in the series is Keep This Quiet! III, it includes the missing years in Keep THIS Quiet Too!  1985-91, just before I went to Owl Farm

Milton Klonsky, one of the three “outlaw writers” in KTQ! I & II, used to say he looked at my life, as it unfolded in New York before his eyes, as “a series of installments in a comic strip.” He said that facetiously. But as I retell the episodes in memoir style, the reader can see the rationale for the statement. Keep This Quiet! III makes a dramatic departure. Leaving New York City (the main locale of Keep This Quiet! I) and Morocco (the main locale of Keep THIS Quiet Too!), I signed up (minus husband) at the C. G. Jung Institute Zurich, to study. As it turned out, I was in for an unexpected, very profound spiritual initiation. Bradley Weber, winner of the 2014 Gonzo Fest literary contest first place and author of Fear and Loathing of the Undead (in progress), finds it:

a fantastic read. Ms. Harrell expands greatly on some of the things she only briefly discussed in the first two books. The connections between physics and the mind are fascinating and oddly reassuring. Pick up all three books for the full scope of Margaret’s story. But if you have a more scientific or (for the lack of a more precise term) spiritual bent, start with Keep This Quiet! III: Initiations. And if you have the chance to see Ms. Harrell speak, you owe it to yourself to go.

Two main figures in Keep This Quiet! III are psychologist Carl Jung and Nobel Prize physicist Wolfgang Pauli, together the authors of the synchronicity concept. A reviewer writes:

Jung & Pauli . . . Courageously, competently Harrell guided this reader through mazes of scientific exploration, all the while keeping her engaging ‘anima’ voice as lure to read on

—Puanani Harvey, Advanced Studies Coordinator, New Mexico Society of Jungian Analysts 

More to look at and read: Ron Whitehead’s introduction

Ron's Intro - You Tube
Ron’s Intro – You Tube

 

 

 

Watch Ron introduce Margaret at the 2014 Gonzo Fest. The filmmaker is Nick Storm of Storm Generation Films.

Ron, a Louisville, Kentucky-born “outlaw poet,” can be seen internationally far and wide. He comments:

Margaret A. Harrell’s Keep This Quiet! III is the real-life alchemical journey of her poet (co-creator with the creative forces of the universe) soul in which she intentionally determinedly makes the journey of initiation, juxtaposing apparently irreconcilable differences into a synthesis, a union of being. And she takes Hunter S. Thompson, Milton Klonsky, Jan Mensaert, Wolfgang Pauli, Carl Jung, and many others with her as she discovers and shares, with us, her own tao her way her I ching her Book of Changes.

In reverse order below is information about the first two volumes in the series

What critics are saying about Keep THIS Quiet Too!

EXCERPT OF THE REVIEW FROM BEAT SCENE IN ENGLAND by Eric Jacobs

Keep THIS Quiet Too!
Keep THIS Quiet Too!

Following on from the whirlwind that was volume one, Margaret Harrell returns with more adventures involving three particular men in her life, Milton Klonsky, Jan Mensaert and Hunter S. Thompson. She was a top editor in her time – she worked on Thompson’s Hell’s Angels – and this provided the door through which she stepped into the lives of this trio. Or should that be the other way around? . . . It is chaotic, shambolic, impulsive, complete and utter madness at times here. Klonsky is the steadiest, a kind of mentor-father figure to Harrell. Mensaert is mercurial, frustrating and often suicidal and then she marries him. Thompson, perhaps the one writer with the biggest profile in American letters, is, well, Hunter S. Thompson as only he was. Mad as a box of mad things, living in the moment, furiously living and she is drawn to his flame. A passionately written memoir that doesn’t sit around being fit and proper and straight laced. . . . As a key to the lives of these three writers it is idiosyncratic and in an age where blandness is the norm it is a pleasure to go on her journey and find out a little about what makes these men tick and what drove her to them.

Next up, Volume One – Keep This Quiet!

Keep This Quiet!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Keep This Quiet! was born out of my relationship with Hunter Thompson over decades. It covers 1966-1969. The relationship started in Random House when one of my bosses, Jim Silberman, asked me to copy edit Hunter’s Hell’s Angels manuscript and be the link – his pathway up to Jim at the top of the chain. I was to keep Hunter happy by catering to his every concern. Hunter knew nothing about me. But he immediately secured permission to phone me at will, paid for by Random House. At first we talked “blind,” something  like the “bookstore girl” and Joe Fox in You’ve Got Mail. Jim traveled out to San Francisco, early on, to meet Hunter. He secured the book (Hells Angels was half written in manuscript), from its intended paperback publisher, Ballantine. Signed and sealed the deal. And we were off to the races.

What Critics Are Saying:

Margaret Harrell’s Keep This Quiet offers an illuminating look at Hunter S. Thompson in full throttle trying to make it as a Top Notch prose-stylist. Harrell fills in many important biographical gaps. A welcome addition to what is becoming the HST cottage industry. Read it.
Douglas Brinkley, editor of The Proud Highway and Fear and Loathing in America

Of special note: click here to read “A feast for the Gonzo soul” – Marty Flynn


I hope you will rush out to buy the book series – experience the live words of Hunter Thompson and relive some of his finest moments.

Keep This Quiet! walks with Hunter Thompson as he enters the wide arena in which he became an outrageous public figure who would not let politicians off the hook and a controversial but somewhat mythical member  of the not-rich-but-famous national figures. I hope this memoir will find a place in your heart, as Hunter did in mine. And if you like it, don’t forget to write a review!

Keep This Quiet! is filled with beautiful, honest, agonized letters Hunter Thompson wrote me while we worked together in the final stages of the preparation of Hell’s Angels. As part of the many wishes he left behind, he personally left me permission to use the letters. Or at least gave me a big high-five from a distance. Left word that I was one of the good ones.

 

 

REVIEW

Three men, embodiments of three different dimensions of the late 1960’s Zeitgeist – wispy dissolution, language-charged intellect, and Gonzo persona-building – are brought together by Harrell to invoke a world of passion and commitment . . . While most readers will come to this book for the Thompson content, in truth all the portraits here – all four of them – are compelling and often touching.

W. C. Bamberger, Rain Taxi Review of Books

KEEP THIS QUIET! a memoir: My Relationship with Hunter S. Thompson, Milton Klonsky, and Jan Mensaert by Margaret A. Harrell is a masterpiece! I never expected to say that about a memoir yet as I say it memories of so many other great works of creative non-fiction autobiographies memoirs etc start flooding in. . . .  And I see clearly that Margaret A. Harrell’s KEEP THIS QUIET! a memoir stands shoulder to shoulder with the greatest works of alltime. And I hear that volume 2 is on the way. How fortunate we are! Bravo Margaret A. Harrell! Thank You!!!

Ron Whitehead, outlaw poet, author of numerous books of poetry and DVDs

Share